How do judges of the Florida District Courts of Appeal reach the bench?

The court's current selection method is merit selection with retention.

Florida District Courts of Appeal / Joined 2001 / Active

Joseph Lewis

Judge, Florida District Courts of Appeal

Joseph Lewis is a Judge of the Florida District Courts of Appeal, serving since 2001. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Born: 1953 · age 73
Tenure: Since 2001 · 25 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
2001	Florida District Courts of Appeal	–	–

Education

Florida State University

Judicial Record

In our data, Lewis authored 182 published opinions for the court (1960–2018), plus 5 dissents and 5 concurrences. Most cited: Montgomery v. State (101 citations).

Published, precedential opinions from the CourtListener corpus. Counts and rankings are objective and recomputable: how we count. We describe the record, not the judge. 94 of these were attributed to Lewis by a unique court-, date-, and surname-match against our roster (marked ), because CourtListener recorded no author for them. Each links to the official text to verify. How we match.

Selected opinions

Year	Case	Citation	Cited
2009	Montgomery v. State	70 So. 3d 603	101
2004	State Office of Atty. Gen. v. Wyndham Intern., Inc.	869 So. 2d 592	40
2002	Florida Hospital v. State Agency for Health Care Administration†	823 So. 2d 844	40
2002	LB v. Department of Children and Families	835 So. 2d 1189	36
2010	Hendricks v. State	34 So. 3d 819	31
2003	Seven Hills, Inc. v. Bentley	848 So. 2d 345	29
2002	Jackson County Hosp. Corp. v. Aldrich	835 So. 2d 318	29
2001	Johnson v. Thigpen	788 So. 2d 410	29
1960	Bagley v. State	119 So. 2d 400	29
2013	Anheuser-Busch Companies, Inc. v. Staples†	125 So. 3d 309	27
2012	Soffer v. R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co.· Concurrence†	106 So. 3d 456	25
2010	Acosta, Inc. v. National Union Fire Insurance Co.	39 So. 3d 565	25
2011	Duval Motors Co. v. Rogers†	73 So. 3d 261	24
1960	Brown v. Ripley	119 So. 2d 712	24
2008	State v. Young	974 So. 2d 601	22

Showing the 15 most-cited of 192 authored opinions in our data. “Cited” is inbound citations across the CourtListener corpus. Case links open the ruling’s full text (CourtListener) or its page here; read the methodology and verify against the primary source.

Questions & answers

How do judges of the Florida District Courts of Appeal reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is merit selection with retention.
Which court is Joseph Lewis on?: Joseph Lewis is a Judge of the Florida District Courts of Appeal.

Sources

Each fact on this page traces to a primary public record.

How we source & reconcile data → Data & Sources

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25 years on the Florida District Courts of Appeal. Data as of 2026-03-31. Informational only; verify against the primary source before relying. Not a consumer report (FCRA).